Most of us won’t admit it, but we often spend a large proportion of our mind-time on revisiting the past and particular in visiting the future by anticipating and visualizing how our life situation is likely to unfold; and in so looking, we tend not to foresee options but rather make assumptions on probabilities, often negatively.

In trying to be in two places at once, we miss opportunities in the most important third place…the present moment.

Eckhart Tolle sums up this paradox nicely in his book The Power of Now:

“To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time; the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation…This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future.

The Now is the most precious thing there is. The eternal present is the space in which your whole life unfolds.